The just closed exhibition at The Flourish, Cardiff Bay comes as a Welsh-Canadian collaboration exploring ‘creative narratives in metal’. Metals can be ductile, shiny, stamped, woven and stretched. They are, quite literally, flexible, and difficult enough to work with that art and manufacturing intersect. I’m looking at these not as an art gallery, but a set of models of different façade ideas. If you happen to be doing an MSc in Computational Methods In Architecture (or Manufacture), this post may be of interest.
Woven Dish is a chunky polished piece of silver. It’s as though a flat block has had organic channels cut into it with a gouge. It’s a lovely effect I’d like to recreate on my curved crease former in thin aluminium. It’s also quite close to the ‘woven reeds’ topologically optimised rib pattern for a tall building under wind load.
Lann 3 is a lovely composite of enamelled copper discs carried on a 3d printed PLA skeleton and incorporating a neat ball-socket joint to facilitate installation.
For Cynthia is a laser cut bowl with a peacock feather motif cut and bent into the metal. The result is a quivering, shimmering surface that reacts to the least breeze or breathe. The bowl is a truncated cone in cross section, so it is a developable surface that could be formed of a single laser cut sheet, but I can’t find the seam.
The photo does a poor job of showing it, but the dish is dish shaped, not flat. it is interesting how that folded rhomboid texture, reminiscent of flat fold orgimi patterns like Eric Gjerede’s rhomboid stars or Gerard Caris’ pentagonal reliefs (scroll down to Reliefstructure 16V-1, 2004), appears. It looks almost as though stamping it into the dish rim was used to bring the overall shape up into a dish.
A few moments trying to colour in the rhomboid tessellation should be enough to convince you that it fails the first test of a developable origami pattern – you cannot colour it in using only two colours without them meeting. Therefore the metal was stretched to produce the stamping, and it’s not a product of pure geometry. A pattern that would work, something more complicated then pleats, would be interesting to see.
Butterbur is a woven basket made from thin copper (perhaps copper tape, woven with the tape back still on, burnt out and then partially polished). The mathematics of building up a surface from woven strips is for a future post (and I bought a hat especially for it) but for now I’ll just say how much I like the detail of this, and the technical difficulty of working with incompressible sharp edged flat developable surfaces to build a more complex surface should not be underestimated.
Bakefoldprint 
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